Fernando Sáez González was born in Laredo in 1921. When he was 10 years old, the year of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, his family left Laredo and moved to Madrid. There, they visited the Lope de Rueda Institución Libre de Enseñanza (free institute of education), where the young Sáez took his first steps as an artist and received his first prizes for drawing.
A restless adolescent in the Spanish capital, Sáez began to frequent the Prado Museum, developing a fascination for van der Weyden, Brueghel, Mantegna, El Bosco and Cranach. After spending the Civil War in Laredo, he returned to Madrid in 1939 where he began to collaborate with the press as a cartoonist the following year. In 1942, he was drafted for a long compulsory military service that lasted until 1946.
Upon his return, he alternated between classes at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts and artists’ gatherings, where he met critics such as Ramón Faraldo and Enrique Azcoaga, painters such as Rafael Zabaleta and Pancho Cossío, sculptors like Ángel Ferrant, and writers like Camilo José Cela, Ernest Hemingway, José García Nieto, Gerardo Diego and Dámaso Alonso.
During this period, he resumed his collaborations as an illustrator, namely with Eduardo Aunós for Editorial Grifón. In parallel, in September 1948, he held his first group exhibition, which featured himself and his brother Martín, who was also a painter.
Artistically, the rugged landscape of the Cantabrian coastline and its harsh chromaticism would forever leave an obvious mark on Sáez’s art, who always remembered summers in Ontorria and nearby Mazcuerras, where his uncle was a parish priest and where he got to know the writer Concha Espina. The coastal outlines and its large chromatic spectrum populate most of his corpus.
In 1950, Sáez held his first individual painting exhibition at the Clan Gallery in Madrid. Exhibitions in Venezuela, Argentina and France followed the same year. Milestones promptly followed: in 1969 he was selected by the Rath Museum in Geneva for an exhibition on the Spanish avant-garde entitled Art espagnol d’aujourd’hui (Spanish art of today). He also held an exhibition at the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts in Santander in 1978 and held his first exhibition at the Casa del Siglo XV in Segovia that same year.
Other remarkable shows of his career include: Aula de Cultura La Venencia (Santander, 2006); the Santiago Casar Gallery (2008) and a large anthological exhibition of his 1964-2005 works on paper at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Santander (2013). In 2017, the Luis González Robles Museum, in Alcalá de Henares, organised another anthology: Fernando Sáez, Seventy Years in Painting.
Sáez remained active practically until he died, drawing every day that he had the strength. He passed away in 2003.
